Becoming Free in the Cotton South challenges our most basic ideas about slavery and freedom in America. Instead of seeing emancipation as the beginning or the ending of the story, as most histories do, Susan Eva O’Donovan explores the perilous transition between these two conditions, offering a unique vision of both the enormous changes and the profound continuities in black life before and after the Civil War.This boldly argued work focuses on a small place—the southwest corner of Georgia—in order to explicate a big question: how did black men and black women’s experiences in slavery shape their lives in freedom? The reality of slavery’s demise is harsh: in this land where cotton was king, the promise of Reconstruction passed quickly, even as radicalism crested and swept the rest of the South. Ultimately, the lives former slaves made for themselves were conditioned and often constrained by what they had endured in bondage. O’Donovan’s significant scholarship does not diminish the heroic efforts of black Americans to make their world anew; rather, it offers troubling but necessary insight into the astounding challenges they faced.Becoming Free in the Cotton South is a moving and intimate narrative, drawing upon a multiplicity of sources and individual stories to provide new understanding of the forces that shaped both slavery and freedom, and of the generation of African Americans who tackled the passage that lay between.

This multidisciplinary volume brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean. The volume discusses a variety of qualitative data on the experience of being a slave in order to recover ordinary lives and, crucially, to place this experience in its Asian local context. Building on the rich scholarship on the slave trade, this volume offers a unique perspective that embraces the origin and afterlife of enslavement as well as the imaginaries and representations of slaves rather than the trade in slaves itself. From Cape to Batavia, slavery is understood as a diffuse practice. This approach helps unearth 18th and 19th century experiences of being a slave in the Indian Ocean world, but also sheds light on continuities in bondage into the present. Contributors force an often hostile archive to extract traces of the lived experience of slavery in court records, petitions or private letters. They also listen to local voices by prying unexplored primary sources such as oral histories, memories and objects.
 

Few Americans identify slavery with the cultivation of rice, yet rice was a major plantation crop during the first three centuries of settlement in the Americas. Rice accompanied African slaves across the Middle Passage throughout the New World to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. By the middle of the eighteenth century, rice plantations in South Carolina and the black slaves who worked them had created one of the most profitable economies in the world.

Black Rice tells the story of the true provenance of rice in the Americas. It establishes, through agricultural and historical evidence, the vital significance of rice in West African society for a millennium before Europeans arrived and the slave trade began. The standard belief that Europeans introduced rice to West Africa and then brought the knowledge of its cultivation to the Americas is a fundamental fallacy, one which succeeds in effacing the origins of the crop and the role of Africans and African-American slaves in transferring the seed, the cultivation skills, and the cultural practices necessary for establishing it in the New World.

In this vivid interpretation of rice and slaves in the Atlantic world, Judith Carney reveals how racism has shaped our historical memory and neglected this critical African contribution to the making of the Americas.

"In this illuminating study Joanne Braxton shows the continuity and tradition in the writing of Afra-American women. An important work for teachers and students of Literature, History, and Women's Studies." --Gerda Lerner "As black American women, we are born into a mystic sisterhood, and we live our lives within a magic circle, a realm of shared language, reference, and allusion within the veil of our blackness and our femaleness. We have been as invisible to the dominant culture as rain; we have been knowers, but we have not been known." Joanne Braxton argues for a redefinition of the genre of black American autobiography to include the images of women as well as their memoirs, reminiscences, diaries, and journals--as a corrective to both black and feminist literary criticism. Beginning with slave narratives and concluding with modern autobiography, she deals with individual works as representing stages in a continuum and situates these works in the context of other writings by both black and white writers. Braxton demonstrates that the criteria used to define the slave narrative genre are inadequate for analyzing Harriet "Linda Brent" Jacobs's pseudonymously published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861). She examines "sass" as a mode of women's discourse and a weapon of self-defense, and she introduces the "outraged mother" as a parallel to the articulate hero archetype. Not even emancipation authorized black women to define themselves or address an audience. Late-nineteenth-century accounts in the form of confessional spiritual autobiographies, travelogue/adventure stories, and slave memoirs enabled such women as Jarena Lee, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Elizabeth Keckley, Susie King Taylor, as well as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth to tell their own extraordinary stories and to shed light on the thousands of lives obscured by illiteracy and sexual and racial oppression. In her diaries, Charlotte Forten Grimké, the gifted poet, epitomizes the problems faced by a well-educated, extremely articulate black woman attempting to find a public voice in America. Moving into the twentieth century, Braxton analyzes the memoir of Ida B. Wells, journalist and anti-lynching activist, and the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Era Bell Thompson. They represent the first generation of black female autobiographers who did not continually come into contact with former slaves and who transcended the essential struggle for survival that occupied earlier writings. For the contemporary black woman autobiographer, the quest for personal fulfillment is the central theme. Braxton concludes with Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1996), which represents the black woman of the 1960s who has found the place to recreate the self in her own image--the place all the others had been searching for. "Braxton's book is scrupulously researched. She has been creative in finding resources and courageous in analyzing and interpreting her finds. This is the word of a diligent mind. The material is mountainous, yet the book sings. Braxton is a poet. Thank goodness." --Maya Angelou "Joanne Braxton's essays on black women's autobiographies delineate and illuminate the personal and historical dimension of an important literary tradition. Emphasizing the distinct character of Afra-American women's experience and relations with each other, she ground their writing of their lives in the struggles and triumphs of the lives they actually led." --Elizabeth Fox-Genovese "In this compelling and lucid study examining the content, context, and continuum of black women autobiographers, Braxton clears the place for it in the curriculum: at the center of black and feminist studies." --Paula Giddings "This is the fullest and most sympathetic study of black American autobiographers I know. By paying close attention to private and public history, to social networks and literary kinships, to narrative structures and patterns of imagery, Braxton leads her readers to see the black woman 'at the center of her own [written] experiences.' At once scholarly and passionate, Braxton's critique will immediately secure her a place among the leading analysts of black American autobiography." --Albert E. Stone "A highly readable and original contribution to the important fields of Afro-American studies, feminist criticism, and autobiographical narrative." --Elaine Showalter "Rich in empathy and insight, Joanne M. Braxton's trailblazing study attends to both the textual and historical dimensions of a powerful literary inheritance. She brings to bear a keen sense of the departures and continuities of which any tradition consists; and an appreciation of the distinctive Afro-American dynamic between literary convention and a vernacular substrate. Braxton doesn't just read--she listens." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Joanne Braxton makes a unique contribution to the scholarship of American autobiography. Her focus on the outraged mother as a figure of rebellion is a significant challenge to our conventional understanding of autobiographical acts." --Hazel Carby "This is the most inclusive and thoughtful literary history of black American women's autobiography in existence…It is not just a collection of essays; it is well knit together and displays multiple traditions as they evolved and are in the process of evolving still." --William L. Andrews "This book marks another milestone in the critical appraisal of American autobiographical writings. In tracing the evolution of a tradition of black women in autobiography in America, Braxton takes us on the first journey of this kind: the black American woman's search for a dignified, self-defining identity through the rejection of traditional female roles. This book sets the tone for future studies of black women's autobiographies." --Nellie McKay

Martin R. Delany’s Blake (1859, 1861–1862) is one of the most important African American—and indeed American—works of fiction of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of Henry Blake’s escape from a southern plantation and his subsequent travels across the United States, into Canada, and to Africa and Cuba. His mission is to unite the black populations of the American Atlantic regions, both free and slave, in the struggle for freedom, whether through insurrection or through emigration and the creation of an independent black state. Blake is a rhetorical masterpiece, all the more strange and mysterious for remaining incomplete, breaking off before its final scene.

This edition of Blake, prepared by textual scholar Jerome McGann, offers the first correct printing of the work in book form. It establishes an accurate text, supplies contextual notes and commentaries, and presents an authoritative account of the work’s composition and publication history. In a lively introduction, McGann argues that Delany employs the resources of fiction to develop a critical account of the interconnected structure of racist power as it operated throughout the American Atlantic. He likens Blake to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, in its willful determination to transform a living and terrible present.

Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Corrected Edition will be used in undergraduate and graduate classes on the history of African American fiction, on the history of the American novel, and on black cultural studies. General readers will welcome as well the first reliable edition of Delany’s fiction.

Winner of the Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History
Winner of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize
Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize
Winner of the Mary Nickliss Prize
Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize

Americans have long viewed marriage between a white man and a white woman as a sacred union. But marriages between African Americans have seldom been treated with the same reverence. This discriminatory legacy traces back to centuries of slavery, when the overwhelming majority of black married couples were bound in servitude as well as wedlock, but it does not end there. Bound in Wedlock is the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century. Drawing from plantation records, legal documents, and personal family papers, it reveals the many creative ways enslaved couples found to upend white Christian ideas of marriage.

“A remarkable book… Hunter has harvested stories of human resilience from the cruelest of soils… An impeccably crafted testament to the African-Americans whose ingenuity, steadfast love and hard-nosed determination protected black family life under the most trying of circumstances.”
—Wall Street Journal

“In this brilliantly researched book, Hunter examines the experiences of slave marriages as well as the marriages of free blacks.”
—Vibe

“A groundbreaking history… Illuminates the complex and flexible character of black intimacy and kinship and the precariousness of marriage in the context of racial and economic inequality. It is a brilliant book.”
—Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother

Slavery may no longer exist as a legal institution, but we still find many forms of non-freedom in contemporary societies. It is a troubling paradox, and one this book addresses by considering a period in which the definition of slavery and freedom proved considerably flexible. Between more familiar forms of slavery—those of antiquity and of the Americas—the institution as it was practiced and theorized in the Byzantine Mediterranean was of a different nature.

Looking at the Byzantine concept of slavery within the context of law, the labor market, medieval politics, and religion, Youval Rotman illustrates how these contexts both reshaped and sustained the slave market. By focusing on a period of great change, his historical analysis brings a new perspective to concepts of slavery and freedom. In this period, when Byzantium had to come to terms with the rising power of the Islamic state, and to fight numerous wars over territory and economic interests, Rotman traces a shift in the cultural perception of slaves as individuals: they began to be seen as human beings instead of private property. His book analyzes slavery as a historical process against the background of the political, social, and religious transformation of the Mediterranean world, and demonstrates the flexible and adaptable character of this institution.

Arguing against the use of the term “slavery” for any extreme form of social dependency, Rotman shows instead that slavery and freedom are unrelated concepts. His work offers a radical new understanding of the geopolitical and religious dynamics that have defined and redefined slavery and freedom, in the past and in our own time.